Kicking into Overdrive: Introducing HyperScale, powered by HP and Atlantis USX!

Over the last several years there have been a number of different technology innovations that have truly captivated my attention. Atlantis Computing’s ILIO product evolving into USX Software Defined Storage (SDS) is definitely one of these attention grabbing technologies! When I first learned about ILIO, I personally experienced the value software-based I/O acceleration and data reduction technologies can bring to Server Based Computing (SBC) and Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) environments, for both Citrix and VMware End User Computing. This was definitely game changing in the way I positioned, architected, and built SBC/VDI virtualized environments. With the evolution into USX, Atlantis [...]

PernixData FVP 2.5 – Quick and Painless Host-Side Read and Write SAN or NAS Storage Performance Acceleration

A year or two ago I started keeping tabs on PernixData, a Silicon Valley based storage performance acceleration startup, around the time well known and regarded industry expert Frank Denneman joined as their Chief Technologist. Frank joined several other former VMware elite including Poojan Kumar and Satyam Vaghani, the great minds behind VMware data products and creator of the Virtual Machine File System (VMFS). With such an all-star former VMware team, I knew PernixData would be bound for greatness, but I have just recently started evaluating their FVP products on my own (starting with FVP 2.0). FVP 2.5 released a [...]

Installing and Configuring Atlantis USX 2.2 for VMware vSphere and NOW Citrix XenServer!

Introduction and Overview Several months ago, I wrote a getting started guide for Installing and Configuring Atlantis USX 2.0 on VMware vSphere. Since that time, two additional releases have become available and new to USX 2.2 is the ability to manage, present, and consume storage from Citrix XenServer! Read more about the USX on XenServer announcement here. At Atlantis Connect in early February, my friend and fellow Citrix Technology Professional, Thomas Poppelgaard did a session with Mark Nijmeijer where Atlantis USX 2.2 was installed and configured on Citrix XenServer live (in beta at the time). To learn more about Atlantis Software Defined Storage and USX, visit www.atlantiscomputing.com. USX 2.2 officially released [...]

Citrix WorkspacePod, an HP Moonshot Architect’s Perspective

TLDR: Citrix WorkspacePod summarized in one word: Bundling. For about the last year and a half, I have been affectionately called Mr. Moonshot among my peers and colleagues.  Thanks everyone, you're too kind! Naturally, at Citrix Summit when one of the big keynote announcements on WorkspacePod surfaced, I started getting a lot of questions. I'm no expert on DataON, so I can't comment on that particular piece. For all I knew, DataON was a commodity/whitebox storage company, and have never even really looked into their Cluster-in-a-Box (CiB) product family. Who knew! Enough about DataON, that's not the focus of this [...]

XenServer 6.5 Dynamic Memory and NVIDIA GRID vGPU? Now Fixed in 6.5! Go For It!

Earlier this year I wrote a blog post highlighting an issue that a coworker ran into with XenServer 6.2 Dynamic Memory Control (DMC) and NVIDIA GRID vGPU. You can find that article here: XenServer Dynamic Memory and NVIDIA GRID vGPU, Don’t Do It! Talking with a couple Citrix and NVIDIA folks including Rachel Berry, Jason Southern, and David Cottingham, I have been informed that this was fixed and validated with the XenServer 6.5 release (aka Creedence). Considering XenServer 6.5 has officially released for web today, it's safe to say DMC is now good to go, provided you're running XenServer 6.5! [...]

Citrix and Atlantis Partner Together to Deliver the First Hyper-Converged Solutions for XenServer 6.5! All-Flash No Less!

Following the heels of the Sanbolic acquisition announcement, today was yet another big day for Citrix in the world of Software Defined Storage! This announcements has more to do with Citrix partnerships, and what they were able to achieve working with one of their longest standing partners in the storage capacity and performance optimization space, Atlantis Computing. This announcement is near and dear to me as I was on staff with Atlantis in August at VMworld when USX 2.0 was launched and awarded Best of VMworld for 2014. Both of these announcements highlight the importance of Software Defined Storage, although [...]

Hot off the Presses: Citrix Acquires Sanbolic, Creators of Melio FS. What’s Next?

The news is out! Citrix has acquired Boston based Software Defined Storage (SDS) company Sanbolic. Click here to read the full press release. Several months back Eva Helan (Co-founder, president and COO of Sanbolic) put me in touch and I had a call with fellow geek Andy Melmed (VP, Enterprise Architecture). Folks who have been in the Citrix space a while know Andy, but this was my first time chatting with him. Among other things, Andy told me a little bit about his history of working at Ardence (pre-Citrix acquisition) and later on the ISV certification team at Citrix (i.e. [...]

XenServer 6.2 Dynamic Memory and NVIDIA GRID vGPU, Don’t Do It!

Updated 2015.1.13: XenServer 6.5 (aka Creedence) has been released to web and this has been resolved in this release. Click here to read my updated article for DMC and vGPU on XenServer 6.5 A couple months back I was working with a colleague of mine (Richard Hoffman on LinkedIn or Twitter) on a blue screen issue he identified on a fairly up-to-date XenServer 6.2, XenDesktop, NVIDIA GRID K1/K2 and vGPU deployment. In his case, he was experiencing crashes related to dxgmms1.sys, nvlddmkm.sys, and various other XenServer errors: xenopsd internal error: Device.Ioemu_failed("vgpu exited unexpectedly") xenopsd internal error: Failure("Couldn't lock GPU with device ID [...]

Getting Started with Atlantis USX! Basic Installation and Configuration Guide for the 2.0 GA Release

About two months ago I joined Atlantis Computing based out of Mountain View, California as a Sr. Solutions Architect. After recent partner trainings, customer demos, POCs, and implementations, I felt the need to share a couple USX deployment scenarios and installation procedures to broaden understanding of USX in the community. USX 2.0 is now generally available and available to download to customers and key partners. If you want to know how to get access to USX, please feel free to reach out! My colleague and VMware VCDX Hugo Phan has a ton of excellent USX resources that you can find [...]

HP Discover 2014 Presentation TB3997 – Make your workforce more productive: Get the right solution, right now, for your mobile workers with HP ConvergedSystem for Client Virtualization

I recently presented a joint-session with HP and Tony Sanchez at Discover 2014 (TB3997) in Las Vegas (http://h30614.www3.hp.com/Discover). Below is the description of the session with exported images from the slide deck. Speakers: Travis Kuter, EG Alliance Manager, HP (www.hp.com) Tony Sanchez (@tonysanchez_ctx), Solutions Architect, Citrix Systems (www.citrix.com) Dane Young (@youngtech), Solutions Architect, Entisys Solutions (www.entisys.com) TB3997: Make your workforce more productive: Get the right solution, right now, for your mobile workers with HP ConvergedSystem for Client Virtualization Compute from anywhere. This is how workers get their jobs done today. Come to this session and talk to the experts from Citrix, HP, and [...]

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